Another day, another racist headline from somewhere in the wingnutosphere ....

This ran recently at the Daily Caller. Where, evidently, no stereotype is too dessicated to trot out once again, and the phrase "illegals" is still considered just A-OK. (It has been taken down since.)

It didn't take long for Carlson's rag, the Daily Caller, to be discredited over its Sen. Menendez scandal story. Howard Kurtz explains it and then wonders when an apology will be forthcoming:

I think it is fair to say that the unsubstantiated story by "The Daily Caller" accusing Senator Robert Menendez of patronizing prostitutes in the Dominican Republic has now been discredited, but the conservative website still hasn't retracted the claim.

When the "Washington Post" reported that one prostitute admitted taking money to lie about the senator, the "Daily Caller" scuffed that the paper had the wrong hooker. Now Dominican police say three women have acknowledged being paid to lie about having sex for money with Menendez whose office now says again, this was a smear job.

Let's leave aside the charge by a top Dominican law enforcement official also reported by "The Post" that a local lawyer said someone claiming to be from "The Daily Caller" offered him $5,000 to find women willing to lie about Menendez.

"The Caller" says that is absolutely not true and I find it hard to imagine, but as for the prostitutes, the website founded by Tucker Carlson says it is, quote, "not independently verified the identities of the women involved in the Dominican probe" and quoting again, "remains unclear" whether one of the prostitutes now retracting her claim was interviewed by a "Caller" reporter.

At this point, if the "Daily Caller" cannot prove the story was true, it owes the senator and its readers an apology.

As C&L has documented many times, most conservatives don't care about accuracy--only about smearing Democrats and spreading hate towards liberals. if the lies help that agenda then all is good.

As Poynter highlighted, Carson loves the attention his phony stories create so can we expect more of them in the future?

Carlson, meanwhile, seems happy his business is in the spotlight. In an interview with The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi on Tuesday, Carlson said: “Oh, it’s a very good day. It’s a good day because it’s an interesting day.”

And of his critics, Carlson said: “I’m not seeking their approval. Why should I care if a bunch of losers on Twitter don’t like it?”

Farhi notes this has been part of the Caller’s recipe for success:

The put-up-your-dukes attitude has made the Daily Caller a rising star among the new Washington media, particularly the conservative kind. … One of its first attention-grabbing stories was its reporting in 2010 on Journolist, an e-mail group started by Post blogger Ezra Klein in which reporters privately trashed various politicians, most of them conservative.The outfit again caused a stir when its White House reporter, Neil Munro, interrupted President Obama’s remarks about immigration last year. …But other Caller “scoops” have fizzled.

Carlson went on Fox News last year to hype a 2007 video of Obama praising his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and suggesting that the federal government had shortchanged African American victims of Hurricane Katrina. Despite build-up for the video from the Drudge Report and Fox’s Sean Hannity, it caused barely a ripple. Most of its content had been reported on before — by, among others, Carlson.

I doubt we'll see Fox News ban Tucker from their Political All Star panel any time soon over these erroneous stories because there are no penalties for these liars.

According to the Washington Post, an official in the Dominican Republic is claiming he was paid by The Daily Caller to get three prostitutes on the record claiming they were with Senator Robert Menendez.

The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.

The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted last fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

The Daily Caller issued a statement Friday saying that the information allegedly provided by the Dominican lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, was false.

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It's one thing to suspect it and quite another to have it confirmed. Mother Jones reports that outgoing Daily Caller Executive Editor David Martosko had quite the career impersonating liberals in order to infiltrate and disrupt their organizations while he worked for PR hack RIck Berman.

Before Daily Caller Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson hired him in 2011—a controversial choice given Martosko's previous arrests and lack of experience in journalism—Martosko spent a decade working for Richard Berman, a longtime PR operative behind a number of industry-backed campaigns. At Berman and Company, Martosko served as the director of research for the Center for Consumer Freedom, a Berman-run nonprofit that opposes new laws on food and beverages. CCF, which is funded by the food and beverage industry, runs Humane Watch, a website that posts derogatory information about the Humane Society of the United States. Martosko was the site's "founding editor." CCF also operates Activist Cash, a website that compiles biographical information on groups and individuals that engage in "anti-consumer activism."

In the 2011 deposition, Martosko acknowledged he used a Facebook account under the name of "Gregory Davis" (later changed to "Preston Davis") to obtain information about animal rights activists. (You can read the full deposition here.) Read the rest...

Martosko didn't stop there. He went on to intentionally disrupt the organizations he was spying on.

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Some of you may have noticed that President Obama was interrupted and then heckled by a supposed "reporter" in the Rose Garden today as he announced his plans to help DREAM-eligible immigrants. And you probably wondered what the hell that was about.

Turns out it was Tucker Carlson and his squad of incompetent buffoons at work, according to David Graham at The Atlantic:

An extremely unusual occurrence happened today as President Obama spoke at the White House. The president was offering a statement on his executive order suspending deportations for certain illegal immigrants brought here as children ... when a reporter started heckling him and shouting questions.

The reporter has been identified as Neil Munro of the Daily Caller, a conservative online news outlet run by Tucker Carlson. Though it employs some talented journalists, the site has become known for partisan chicanery. Perhaps most notably, the DC ran a story alleging that the EPA planned to hire 230,000 new workers -- or roughly 10 percent of the entire federal workforce -- and then refused to retract the story in the face of widespread and justified mockery.

Interrupting the president mid-speech is considered a serious breach of etiquette, and Obama's reaction shows how peeved (and probably taken aback) he was. Munro, and the Daily Caller, have immediately come in for harsh criticism by a wide range of journalists, including conservative ones. The problem isn't that Munro was asking tough questions; it's that he interrupted the commander-in-chief to ask them and in doing so guaranteed that none of the assembled press would be able to ask any serious questions -- since it's fairly clear that Munro's query was intended as provocation.

U.S. News and World Report called it "a first for the White House Rose Garden":

The heckler, who challenged the president about how unemployed Americans could be affected, visibly upset the president, who said: "This is the right thing to do for the American people."

When interrupted by the heckler again, Obama got heated, saying: "It's not time for questions, not while I'm speaking," and "I didn't ask for an argument."

Before walking out of the Rose Garden, the heckler yelled out that he was an immigrant himself.

You can get a sense of the outrage from the reporters whose day got screwed by Munro over at The Washington Post.

Oh, but wait! The best part is that Carlson and Munro are unrepentant and unapologetic, claiming in their statement that Munro thought he had timed his question for the end of Obama's remarks!

Neil Munro, White House Correspondent: “I always go to the White House prepared with questions for our president. I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States. I know he rarely takes questions before walking away from the podium. When I asked the question as he finished his speech, he turned his back on the many reporters, and walked away while I and at least one other reporter asked questions.”

Tucker Carlson, Editor-in-Chief: “I don’t remember Diane Sawyer scolding her colleague Sam Donaldson for heckling President Reagan. And she shouldn’t have. A reporter’s job is to ask questions and get answers. Our job is to find out what the federal government is up to. Politicians often don’t want to tell us. A good reporter gets the story. We’re proud of Neil Munro.”

Neil Patel, Publisher: “The President today announced a very controversial policy and does not want to answer tough questions about it. Neil Munro is a veteran Washington reporter who today tried his best to time his question to be first as the President was wrapping up his remarks. He in no way meant to heckle the President of the United States.”

Go ahead and watch the video. As you can see, Munro chirps up well before there's any indication that Obama has wrapped up -- and indeed, does it while Obama is in mid-sentence!

Actually, it's being generous to presume that Munro was simply being incompetent. This looks like the typical kind of provocation we've come to expect from right-wing propagandists posing as real reporters.

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This little piece of nonsense comes to us via Tucker Carlson and Foster Freiss' Daily Caller by way of Raw Story. It features Jonah Goldberg, arrogant insider and Editor-at-Large of the National Review Online, a conservative repository for neocon ideas.

Mr. Goldberg admits in this interview that Mitt Romney just isn't going to play with the younger set, so instead of thinking through reasons for that failure, he spends some time trashing younger people. He might have made some arguments for why young people feel so alienated from the Republican party right now -- student loans, health care, and corporate elitism -- but instead he suggests that their ignorance should be beaten out of them. That beating, by the way, should be physical if necessary:

GOLDBERG: Personally, I think the voting age should be much, higher, not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest….[I]t is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where, ‘Oh, young people are for it so it must be special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them young people. [...]

The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned.

Isn't this the guy who devoted an entire (albeit fraudulent) book to the supposed fascist tendencies of liberals?

Mr. Goldberg also thinks young people should not have the right to vote at age 18 but doesn't have a peep to say about sending them off to die in a country thousands of miles away for the oligarchs' pleasure.

Goldberg specifically takes issue with young people's contention that socialism is better than capitalism. This is where he contends they most need their beating, because there is "no other system that creates wealth better than democratic capitalism." Repeat after me: Conservatives believe bullying is the answer.

What if we were to rethink that statement? What if we were to say that democratic capitalism thrives in a culture where the constraints of health care, education, and an aging workforce were the platform to launch capitalistic ventures? I can't help thinking that true wealth creation, the kind that involves tangible benefits like job security, a better quality of life, a healthy population and community priorities, would thrive in an environment where it wasn't constantly bogged down under the constraints of unbridled, greedy capitalism.

Let's be honest here. We do not live in a country with democratic capitalism anyway. We live in a country where consumption and growth are the holy grails of financialism, which is an entirely different way to accumulate wealth than democratic capitalism. Anymore, it more resembles a classic oligopoly.

Mitt Romney isn't wealthy because he went out into the world and made things that made the world a better place. He's wealthy because he had money that he used to make more money. In Romney's case, his wealth wasn't the product of him being particularly smart or particularly creative. It was the product of money equating to power, and that power being used to strip others of their wealth and power, which had a handsome payoff for him at the expense of others.

Young people are clear-headed enough to recognize that their constraints are the result of greed and an unrelenting need to feed the financialist beast. It's hard to imagine any of them being particularly excited about that.

Though I must say, I'm enjoying the spectacle of conservatives alienating the next generation of voters. So un-Reaganlike. To Jonah Goldberg, I offer this indictment written by one of those 18-year olds you'd like to slap around. She's my daughter. Get near her with your open hand and I'll call the dogs out on you.

America is running in circles, and pushing solutions that will never work. It’s not a race with China or Korea or Japan that we’re running, but a race to understand that the world view we currently hold is warped. We will continue to fight ourselves and drive our sheeplike children to this school and that school in a desperate hunt for that ever elusive “excellence”, yet forever stand away from it as long as we fail to recognize the importance of the integration of our education, that we are not machines but instead organisms functioning in unison. That we are not simply a sack of organs, skin over bone, but instead transcend pieces of ourselves into a bigger painting, united in our journey of life, understanding and progress.

When did the goal of our lives become "democratic capitalism" and a constant quest for wealth? What happened to living contentedly in our communities, raising children, painting, making music, dancing, working together for a greater good? When did we decide young people were ignorant idiots?

We didn't. Jonah Goldberg is the ignorant bullying idiot here, and his financialist greed is showing.

In order to enter the contest, one must give their full name, email address, and agree to receive one of their daily digests. Oh, and agree to the terms and conditions of the contest, too. Here's the promo:

The Daily Caller will be giving away one gun per week until Election Day – November 6, 2012.

The FMK9C1 is an American-made high capacity 9mm designed by Jim Pontillo and manufactured in
California. Each gun is engraved with the Bill of Rights and comes in one of three colors.

To enter this week’s contest, simply sign up below to receive updates from The Daily Caller. Our DC
Morning emails are an informative and amusing way to keep up with the latest news.

According to the terms and conditions, contestants must undergo a background check and file the necessary forms with the ATF in order to actually receive their custom-colored, high-powered pistol.

W.T.F.? Media Matters has more on Jim Pontillo, manufacturer of the spiffy prize:

Pontillo has also published some creepily bizarre stuff that transcends mere fringy-ness and is actually pretty alarming. Like his one-act play about the Virginia Tech massacre (written from the point of view of the murder weapon). And his belief that "we should send the U.S. Military down to Mexico, seize their oil fields, and confiscate the proceeds until the Mexican government changes its policy of encouraging their population to come here for work and send money home, all subsidized by American taxpayers."

Dave Weigel:

So far, only the wags at Media Matters have explored beyond the stunt to find out more about Pontillo. He's the kind of gun manufacturer who likes to write Human Events columns about how Arizona's SB1070 was " a warning to a despotic administration that the American people are only going to tolerate a limited amount of assault on their sovereignty." But that was two years ago, and Pontillo, like most conservatives who talk this way, decided that winning the 2010 midterms was probably better than open rebellion. I showed Carlson the Arizona column, just to check. "A little rebellion once in a while isn't a bad thing," he said.

This aligns with the much-touted conservative belief that in the day and age where "liberals" are in charge, conservatives need their guns because otherwise their freedoms will die in the fire of liberal socialism. Yet, it's conservatives who are killing our freedoms with their assault on women, schools, libraries, and universities.

Remember when they wail about gun shortages that all they have to do is agree to receive right-wing pap in their inbox to have a chance to be one of the lucky rebels that can jam a gun in their pants and tell the rest of us what to do.

You'd think the wingers would figure out that James O'Keefe makes them look like fools every time he posts another one of his "videos." You'd think they might consider not pimping those videos like they're real when they're so easy to debunk. You'd think.

This time, it's North Carolina under fire, but O'Keefe ridiculously claims voter fraud when the only fraud is O'Keefe and his bogus claims. This time around, O'Keefe features a "dead voter" and a voter who he claims is illegally registered to vote because he was not a citizen at the time he was called for jury duty. Unfortunately for O'Keefe, he became a citizen in the 80s, a fact that was easily verifiable before publishing the video.

As for O'Keefe's dead guy, it turns out James forgot that "Jr." at the end of a guy's name means he's the son of the dead guy and also happens to be a very much alive registered voter.

Via Media Matters:

Yes, as multiple obituaries for Bolton note, he was survived by, among others, his son Michael Gordon Bolton, Jr. Public records searches using the Nexis database confirm that Bolton Jr. was registered to vote at the same address given to the poll worker by the O'Keefe operative.

This isn't the only error of this sort O'Keefe made. As ThinkProgress noted, the "non-citizen" voter supposedly exposed by the video is actually a naturalized citizen.

The best screw-up of all is the one where O'Keefe punks the Daily Caller, Breitbart.com and Michelle Malkin. I love it when one of their own hangs them out to dry so thoroughly. In the opener of his ten-minute long video, O'Keefe's minions are walking up a driveway to "prove" that a non-citizen has voted in the North Carolina primary.

Via ThinkProgress Justice:

Now, it turns out that the second “non-citizen,” William Romero, is actually a citizen as well, according to his family.

The video opens with O’Keefe’s cameraman walking up Romero’s driveway and confronting a member of his family about whether he is a citizen. O’Keefe points to court records from 2010 where Romero was excused from jury duty because he was not a citizen at the time. Therefore, as O’Keefe argues, Romero’s voter registration dated December 5, 2011 is fraudulent because Romero “is not a United States citizen.”

Oops! That calendar can be a pesky thing. It turns out Romero became a citizen in early 2011, and registered to vote because that's what good citizens in this country do: they vote.

In fact, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller — it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual — that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

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It is more than a little bit rich to consider that Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters for America for some weird allegation of coordination with the White House. In case you weren't aware, the Daily Caller exists because Foster Friess, Rick Santorum's billionaire, has tossed millions into the venture. I'm certain he doesn't expect anything in return for that investment, right? I'm equally certain that they're not skewing their Republican primary coverage in favor of Rick Santorum. Right?

Here's the content of the attack against Media Matters. Carlson's outfit alleges that there is direct coordination of messages between the White House and outside media, and he has unsourced quotes and a private memo to prove it! And because they view Media Matters' head David Brock as paranoid, these things should somehow prove the need to strip them of their tax-exempt status. Of course, this is part of a larger campaign that has been ongoing since July of last year to try to strip Media Matters of their tax-exempt status.

Via The Politico:

The top editors at the Daily Caller have come out with the first in a series of articles about the liberal media watchdog Media Matters For America, and in doing so they have suggested that MSNBC and reporters from the Washington Post, POLITICO, the Huffington Post and elsewhere have served as dumping grounds or willing surrogates for MMFA's research.

But in making this allegation, Carlson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller, and Vince Coglianese, the senior online editor, do not cite specific examples to back up that allegation. And reached by phone this morning, Carlson suggested that he did not need to cite specific examples because the charges against the reporters were being made by staffers at MMFA, not by the Daily Caller.

"The charge is not our charge," Carlson explained. "The charge is being made by employees at Media Matters, who would know. This is not an editorial, it is reporting that we did out of which came the claim that we wrote in the story. I can't add to what they've already told us."

Pardon me here. Media Matters publishes its research for anyone to use. Isn't it likely that liberals would be most likely to use it? I certainly make sure to stop by their site and check because it's a lot easier than actually watching that junk 24/7, after all. This seems to me to be a non-story turned into a story in order to allow Megyn to renew Fox News' call to revoke Media Matters' tax-exempt status, which of course they do in the course of this interview, at about 6:50 or so:

KELLY: I don't know. Is there something you think needs to be done as a result of all of this? About Media Matters. I mean, are they-- in terms of tax dollars, in terms of just public awareness, or is it just a group that has an outlook like a lot of groups that have an outlook, and is entitled to that point of view?

COGLIANESE: Well, we believe that they deserve scrutiny. I mean, as a journalistic organization we believe that Media Matters deserves to be shown the light of day and let the people judge for themselves. Now you bring up the issue of tax exemption. They are a tax-exempt organization, a 501(c)(3).

Their proximity to the White House, their ability to coerce media, and really their efforts to destroy Fox News -- and by the way, that's not just like throwing out a term, they really do want to destroy this network -- really does raise questions.

Can an organization that claims tax-exempt status go after a media organization, a journalistic organization like Fox News and try and destroy its business? They went so far as to try to destroy Ford Motor Company's business in their efforts to take down Lou Dobbs on CNN.

This is an influential organization that's claiming tax-exempt status and it deserves scrutiny.

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Conservative pontificators are always recycled on TV no matter how ridiculous and petty they are. Tucker Carlson left CNN to start an even worse show on MSNBC after Bush was reelected that failed pretty quickly. Anyway, he soon jumped on the web and started the Daily Caller to be part of the online revolution. His site is quickly becoming a reflection of his own failed pundit career.

See, truth and facts do not matter. Greg Sargent details their latest atrocity.

Not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before.

As you may have heard, the Daily Caller took a terrible hit yesterday after falsely reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire 230,000 new “bureaucrats” — at a cost of $21 billion! — to implement new climate rules. The tale quickly went viral on the right as the latest example of Obama overreach and government run amok, and the fact that the tale was comically absurd on its face didn’t seem to slow the frenzy.

But now the Daily Caller is doubling down on the story, and the argument it’s making in its own defense is really something to behold.

To back up: As Kate Sheppard noted yesterday in her post debunking the original Daily Caller story, there are only 17,000 employees at the EPA, which alone makes the Daily Caller’s claim ridiculous. Not only that, but the legal brief that formed the basis for the Daily Caller story was actually pointing to the 230,000 new employees as a theoretical outcome to be avoided. That is, EPA was arguing that the high number of new employees would be necessary if the agency didn’t have a so-called “tailoring rule.” This rule, which actually restricts the EPA’s regulatory powers to limiting emissions from the largest greenhouse gas producers, is being challenged in court, and EPA is trying to defend it.

Case closed, right? Well, no, of course not.

Today, in response to the criticism, Daily Caller executive editor David Martosko said the publication is standing by the story:

“The EPA is well-known for expanding its reach, especially regarding greenhouse gas emissions. What’s ‘comically wrong’ is the idea that half of Washington won’t admit it. The EPA’s own court filing speaks volumes,” Martosko said in an email.

“What’s more likely: that the Obama administration’s EPA wants to limit its own power, or that it’s interested in dramatically increasing its reach and budget? Anyone who has spent more than a few months in Washington knows the answer,” he added.

This truly is low comedy. The Daily Caller is now claiming that the original tall tale is true, simply because, well, the government regulatory apparatus by definition wants to expand rapaciously in reach and power. Once it has been established that government regulation is inherently onerous and bad and relentlessly expansionary, literally any fact at all can be pressed into service to support that unshakable overarching truth — even facts that directly contradict it. Nothing else could possibly be true, and therefore, it isn’t.

This isn’t meant in a glib way. Recognizing the absolute irrelevance of the facts at hand is central to understanding what’s really going on in situations such as these. This is an old story, but you almost never see examples in which the cynicism is quite this brazen. In this sense, the Daily Caller really has revealed a larger truth, albeit not the one it intended.

So they make stuff up and then do what conservatives usually do, they continue to promote falsehoods. Their is no lie big enough for them not to try and ferment into a full-blown Villager story like Hot Air's (read: out of thin) idiotic "Ford Gate" lie that was debunked by Ford.

Breathless thread title at Hot Air reporting a piece from a columnist from the Detroit News web site :

“Ford pulls bailout-criticism ad after pressure from Obama administration”

Much talk about about phone calls and pressure from the WH to pull a Ford ad talking about Ford not taking a bailout. Comments follow about Big Brother’s control of private industry. Great story, but it turns out to be BS as the Hot Air updates admit:

Update: Ford is responding on its Facebook page that it didn’t pull the ad under pressure, but instead had it rotate out normally. That doesn’t explain why Ford pulled it from its YouTube account, though.

Update II: Actually, it appears that Ford deleted the ad and then reposted it on Friday, for some reason, where it now has only 305 views.

Or the Solyndra nontroversy garbage:

David Roberts at Grist has a great overview today of the Solyndra nontroversy, based partly on recent polling and focus groups. The upshot? Support for solar energy remains strong even among conservatives, and the non-scandal "scandal" is basically confined to the Fox News nuts:...read on.

Snippy Tuck

The truth is that it is (it's a legal case, click the link to read the explanation),the Daily Caller has been shown to be pathetic fools --- and Tucker Carlson and his minions, like the petulant children they are, refuse to admit they were wrong.

Recall this sad little episode back in the day when Carlson would pollute the airwaves on a regular basis. That anecdote was almost certainly a total lie from beginning to end.

EDITOR'S NOTE: "Journalists" make corrections, propagandists make things up.